Forte come un bue.Strong as an ox.
She didn’t have anybody either. I’d worked it out over three months of buying too much bread. In she went in the dark, out came the bread, and I had never once seen a single soul help her carry it. She was as alone in there as I was out here. The grout and the holdout. Two people pouring all their warmth into the thing in front of them—her into the dough, me into everyone else—because the dough doesn’t leave you and the family can’t, and that way you never have to find out what’s underneath, never have to risk the one warm thing being foryou.
I should have driven home. I should have folded it away with the cold useful things and gotten some sleep and come back at a decent hour with a joke ready.
I didn’t move.
I sat in the dark across from the only warm light on the street, restless, aching, hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food, drawn toward it the way a body is drawn toward fire on a cold night—warm, warm, do not touch—and I did not yet know why, or I knew exactly why and would not say it, even out here, even to nobody, even in Sicilian.
The light burned on. Gold against the black. Stubborn. Awake.
Chapter 2
Katerina
Thereisathingyour hands learn that your head never can. My hands knew the dough before my head was awake enough to.
Three in the morning, the kitchen black except for the under-counter light, and my hands were already in it, turning, folding, feeling for the give. I felt like a zombie—still asleep, still dreaming—but it didn’t matter. My hands knew. They’d done this ten thousand times. They could do it without me.
That’s the trade. You give it your hands and it gives you back a kind of quiet.
I had the ovens up. Heat coming off the brick in waves, pushing the cold of the street back toward the door where it belonged. The radio was on low, a Greek station that played at this hour. Some old rebetiko thing, a bouzouki and a man with gravel in his throat singing about a woman who left. They were always singing about a woman who left. I let it run under everything.
Flour hung in the air. You could see it in the light, a fine gold haze drifting where the heat moved it. I had it on my forearms past the elbow, in the creases of my knuckles, dusted into the old burn scars that the oven gave me my first year, when I was still learning the difference between heat I could touch and heat that would teach me. I licked sugar off my thumb without thinking. Tasted the cardamom. Right. Good.
I braided the tsoureki next, three ropes of dough I’d let rise overnight, and this part I could do blind. Over, under, over, pull it taut, tuck the ends. My grandmother did it this way. My father did it this way. The braid came up glossy and even under my hands and I egg-washed it and laid the whole tray in the deck oven and shut the door on it, and for a second I just stood there with my palm flat on the warm steel, the way you’d put a hand on a sleeping animal to feel it breathe.
Above the register hung the icon. Saint Spyridon, dark with age, his little gold halo catching the under-light. My father’s. He’d carried it from Kalamata in a shoebox wrapped in a sweater and he’d hung it over every register he ever stood behind in this country, in other men’s shops, working other men’s dough, for thirty years. And taped beside the coffee machine, curling at the corners, was the photograph — him in this apron, the one I had on now, grinning at whoever held the camera, younger than I’d ever known him, with his whole life still in front of him and none of it gone wrong yet.
“Kalimera, Baba,” I said. Quiet. The way you’d say it to someone asleep in the next room.
The apron was his. I wore it every day. It was too big and I’d never taken it in. There were stains on it I hadn’t made and didn’t want to wash out. It still smelled like him, underneath the flour, if I let myself believe it did.
I had a thing I did, every morning, after the bread that paid the rent was in the ovens. I made his.
His mother’s recipe. A honey loaf with mastic in it—that resin you chewed, that tasted like pine and something extra, that you grated in fine so it perfumed the whole crumb. He’d tried to teach me. Forty times he tried, standing at my shoulder in this kitchen the last year of his life when the cancer had already made his hands shake too bad to do it himself. He’d talk me through it. The mastic goes in cold, Katya. Patience. You feel for it. And I never once got it right while he was alive to taste it, and I’d promised myself—stupidly—that I’d get it before I forgot the sound of his voice saying.
I’d been at it a year. A year of mornings. I measured the mastic. I worked it cold into the dough the way he showed me. I shaped the loaf and scored the cross in the top with my thumbnail and slid it in and waited, and the kitchen filled with that smell, pine and honey and warm bread, and for the length of the bake I always let myself believe today.
I pulled it out twenty minutes later and I knew before I broke it.
The crumb was wrong. Too tight, too dry. When I tried it, the mastic was bitter where it should have been sweet, sitting on the loaf. His melted in.
I stood there with it warm in my hands and I let the disappointment go through me. One breath. Then I wrapped the failed loaf in a cloth to give away later, because you don’t throw out good bread, even bread that isn’tthebread, and I went back to the work that actually kept the lights on.
That was the thing nobody tells you about doing it alone. There’s nobody to fail in front of, which sounds like mercy and isn’t. There’s nobody to say it’s all right, do it again tomorrow. There’s just you and the next tray. The till has to come up right by Friday or it doesn’t matter how good your tsoureki is.
I was tired in a way sleep didn’t touch. A year now. A year of this hour with no name, of being the only living thing on a streetgoing dark store by store, of doing every part of it—the baking and the books and the buying and the hauling and the smiling—with one pair of hands. My father had wanted this his whole life. His own shop, his name on it, finally, after thirty years working other men’s. He never got it. He got sick first. So I got it for him, after, with the little he left and the lease nobody else wanted, and I painted FILOXENIA on the window in green because that was the word he used for it—welcome, hospitality, the stranger made guest—and I’d kept the doors open one more day and one more day and one more day, for him.
Through the front glass the sky was going from black to the color of old steel. Morning, such as it was. I wiped my hands down the apron, his apron, and I filled the cases—the koulourakia in their rows, the tsoureki glossy and braided, the baklava already weeping syrup into the tray. Cannoli, too, for the Italians. I put the kettle on. I straightened the photograph that didn’t need straightening.
Then I went to the door, and I turned the sign, and I braced.
Thefirstpersonthroughthe door was always the old woman from the apartments over the dry cleaner—eighty if she was a day, in a coat that had seen three husbands, who came for one koulouraki and a coffee and to tell me about her hip and her son who never called and the woman downstairs who stole her newspaper. I knew it all. I could have recited it. I poured the coffee before she got her gloves off.
“You look tired,” she told me, which is what she told me every day, the way other people say good morning.
“I’m radiant,” I said. “It’s just the lighting.”
